Download or read book Gotham written by Edwin G. Burrows and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-19 with total page 1412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe. In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city's street-grid plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city. The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth. Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one great blockbuster of a book.
Download or read book Greater Gotham written by Mike Wallace and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-04 with total page 1000 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this utterly immersive volume, Mike Wallace captures the swings of prosperity and downturn, from the 1898 skyscraper-driven boom to the Bankers' Panic of 1907, the labor upheaval, and violent repression during and after the First World War. Here is New York on a whole new scale, moving from national to global prominence -- an urban dynamo driven by restless ambition, boundless energy, immigrant dreams, and Wall Street greed. Within the first two decades of the twentieth century, a newly consolidated New York grew exponentially. The city exploded into the air, with skyscrapers jostling for prominence, and dove deep into the bedrock where massive underground networks of subways, water pipes, and electrical conduits sprawled beneath the city to serve a surging population of New Yorkers from all walks of life. New York was transformed in these two decades as the world's second-largest city and now its financial capital, thriving and sustained by the city's seemingly unlimited potential. Wallace's new book matches its predecessor in pure page-turning appeal and takes America's greatest city to new heights.
Download or read book Gotham written by Edwin G. Burrows and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-19 with total page 1413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe. In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city's street-grid plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city. The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth. Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one great blockbuster of a book.
Download or read book Building Gotham written by Keith D. Revell and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These issues of city-building and institutional change involved more than the familiar push and pull of interest groups or battles between bosses, reformers, immigrants, and natives. Revell explores the ways in which technical values - a distinctive civic culture of expertise - helped to reshape ideas of community, generate new centers of public authority, and change the physical landscape of New York City."--Jacket.
Download or read book A New Deal for New York written by Mike Wallace and published by Bell & Weiland Publishers/Gotham Center Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses a new way of thinking about the future of New York City following the attack of September 11th, arguing for a broad plan for improvement including such projects as a revitalized port and more affordable housing.
Download or read book Forgotten Patriots written by Edwin G. Burrows and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-11-11 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1775 and 1783, some 200,000 Americans took up arms against the British Crown. Just over 6,800 of those men died in battle. About 25,000 became prisoners of war, most of them confined in New York City under conditions so atrocious that they perished by the thousands. Evidence suggests that at least 17,500 Americans may have died in these prisons—more than twice the number to die on the battlefield. It was in New York, not Boston or Philadelphia, where most Americans gave their lives for the cause of independence. New York City became the jailhouse of the American Revolution because it was the principal base of the Crown's military operations. Beginning with the bumper crop of American captives taken during the 1776 invasion of New York, captured Americans were stuffed into a hastily assembled collection of public buildings, sugar houses, and prison ships. The prisoners were shockingly overcrowded and chronically underfed—those who escaped alive told of comrades so hungry they ate their own clothes and shoes. Despite the extraordinary number of lives lost, Forgotten Patriots is the first-ever account of what took place in these hell-holes. The result is a unique perspective on the Revolutionary War as well as a sobering commentary on how Americans have remembered our struggle for independence—and how much we have forgotten.
Download or read book Empire City written by Kenneth T. Jackson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 1026 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major anthology brings together the best literary writing about New York--from O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck to Paul Auster and James Baldwin.
Download or read book Gotham Rising written by Jules Stewart and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-28 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York is often described as the greatest city in the world. Yet much of the iconic architecture and culture which so defines the city as we know it today – from the Empire State Building to the Pastrami sandwich - only came into being in the 1930s, in what was perhaps the most significant decade in the city's 400-year history. After the roaring twenties, the catastrophic Wall Street Crash and ensuing Depression seemed to spell disaster for the vibrant city. Yet, in this era, New York underwent an architectural, economic, social and creative renaissance under the leadership of the charismatic mayor Fiorello La Guardia. After seizing power, he declared war on the mafia mobs running vast swathes of the city, attacked political corruption and kick-started the economy through a variety of construction and infrastructure projects. In culture, this was the age of the Harlem Renaissance championed by writers like Langston Hughes, the jazz age with the advent of Tin-Pan Alley, the Cotton Club and immortals such as Duke Ellington making his name in the Big Apple. Weaving these stories together, Jules Stewart tells the story of an iconic city in a time of change.
Download or read book Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory written by Mike Wallace and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about why history matters. It shows how popularized historical images and narratives deeply influence Americans' understanding of their collective past. A leading public historian, Mike Wallace observes that we are a people who think of ourselves as having shed the past but also avid tourists who are on a "heritage binge," flocking by the thousands to Ellis Island, Colonial Williamsburg, or the Vietnam Memorial.Wallace probes into the trivialization of history that pervades American culture as well as the struggles over public memory that provoke stormy controversy. The recent imbroglio surrounding the National Air and Space Museum's proposed Enola Gay exhibit was reported as centering on why the U.S. government decided to use the A-Bomb against Japan. Wallace scrutinizes the actual plans for the exhibit and investigates the ways in which the controversy drew in historians, veterans, the media, and the general public.Whether his subject is multimillion dollar theme parks owned by powerful corporations, urban museums, or television docudramas, Mike Wallace shows how their depictions of history are shaped by assumptions about which pasts are worth saving, whose stories are worth telling, what gets left out, and who is authorized to make the decisions. Author note: Mike Wallace is Professor of History at John Jay College, City University of New York. He is the co-author, with Edwin G. Burrows, of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for History.
Download or read book The Finest Building in America written by Edwin G. Burrows and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Built in 1853 in New York's Bryant Park and immediately pronounced the most beautiful structure in America, the Crystal Palace was intended not simply to emulate but rival the famous Victorian landmark in London's Hyde Park. As with its English counterpart, however, its beauty was ephemeral. It caught fire, and on October 5, 1858, "great waves of lurid light" overtook spectators and those rushing to save it. Within thirty minutes, the beloved dome was nothing but a heap of smoldering debris. In his latest book, Edwin G. Burrows, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for History and co-author of GOTHAM: A History of New York to 1898, offers a memorable and elegiac look at the Crystal Palace. While it didn't match in dimension Robert Paxton's London original--the scale of which was truly colossal--the New York version became a beloved landmark almost from the instant of its creation. Centerpiece of the 1853 World's Fair, it was home to numerous exhibitions and became a showplace for displaying the growing industrial might of the nation. Walt Whitman rhapsodized about it as "Earth's modern wonder, History's Seven outstripping." Its sudden loss provoked intense mourning-matched only perhaps by the razing of the old Penn Station a century later-and then gradually it slipped from memory. The Finest Building in America will evoke the Crystal Palace's life and times, replete with beautiful period images. The first book-length account of the building's short but glorious life, Burrows book aims to restore it in the minds and hearts of New Yorkers and New York aficionados and fans everywhere"--
Download or read book Naming New York written by Sanna Feirstein and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2001-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Historical Society docent Feirstein has written a historically rich guide to New York City that will entertain both New Yorkers and tourists as they walk through the Big Apple. The histories of the city's major neighborhoods, as well as the history of their names divide the book into sections, the remainder of which contains the names of streets, parks, plazas, corners, alleys, and avenues in that neighborhood and the history of each name. The guide is illustrated with bandw photos of New York's illustrious folk. c. Book News Inc.
Download or read book Greater Gotham written by Mike Wallace and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 1195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Between consolidation and the end of World War One, New York was transformed and transforming, mirroring the juggernauting dynamism of the country at large--and largely fueling it. The names of two of its streets encapsulate the degree of the city's preeminence: Wall Street and Broadway. [This book] reveals the workings of the city's consolidation; the emerging hegemony of its financial markets, which effectively reconstructed U.S. capitalism; the influx of migrants from other continents and from the American South; the development of its massive infrastructure--subways and waterways and electrical grid; and New York's growing dominance over the arts, media, and entertainment"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Five Points written by Tyler Anbinder and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century NYC’s most dynamic and dangerous neighborhood comes vividly to life in this “careful, intelligent, and sympathetic history” (The New York Times Book Review). Located in today’s Chinatown, Five Points was home to poor immigrants and other marginalized communities. It witnessed more riots, scams, prostitution, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in America. But at the same time it was a font of creative energy, crammed full of cheap theaters, dance halls, and boxing matches. It was also the home of meeting halls for the political clubs and the machine politicians who would come to dominate not just the city but an entire era in American politics. Drawing from letters, diaries, newspapers, bank records, police reports, and archaeological digs, Anbinder has written the first-ever history of Five Points, the neighborhood that was a microcosm of the American immigrant experience. The story that Anbinder tells is the classic tale of America’s immigrant past, as successive waves of new arrivals fought for survival in a land that was as exciting as it was dangerous, as riotous as it was culturally rich. A New York Times Notable Book
Download or read book King s Handbook of New York City written by Moses King and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 938 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Transfiguring America written by Jeffrey Steele and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transfiguring America is the product of more than ten years of research and numerous published articles on Margaret Fuller, arguably America's first feminist theorist and one of the most important woman writers in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Fuller's development of a powerful language that paired cultural critique with mythmaking, Steele shows why her writing had such a vital impact on the woman's rights movement and modern conceptions of gender. This groundbreaking study pays special attention to the ways in which Fuller's feminist consciousness and social theory emerged out of her mourning for herself and others, her dialogue with Emersonian Transcendentalism, and her eclectic reading in occult and mythical sources. Transfiguring America is the first book to provide detailed analyses of all of Fuller's major texts, including her mystical Dial essays, correspondence with Emerson, Summer on the Lakes, 1844 poetry, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and New York Tribune essays written both in New York and Europe. Starting from her own profound sense of loss as a marginalized woman, Fuller eventually recognized the ways in which the foundational myths of American society, buttressed by conservative religious ideologies, replicated dysfunctional images of manhood and womanhood. With Woman in the Nineteenth Century, after exploring the roots of oppression in her essays and poetry, Fuller advanced the cause of woman's rights by conceptualizing a more fluid and equitable model of gender founded upon the mythical reconfiguration of human potential. But as her horizons expanded, Fuller demanded not only political equality for women, but also emotional, intellectual, and spiritual freedom for all victims of social oppression. By the end of her career, Steele shows, Fuller had blended personal experience and cultural critique into the imaginative reconstruction of American society. Beginning with a fervent belief in personal reform, she ended her career with the apocalyptic conviction that the dominant myths both of selfhood and national identity must be transfigured. Out of the ashes of personal turmoil and political revolution, she looked for the phoenix of a revitalized society founded upon the ideal of political justice.
Download or read book The Island at the Center of the World written by Russell Shorto and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2005-04-12 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a riveting, groundbreaking narrative, Russell Shorto tells the story of New Netherland, the Dutch colony which pre-dated the Pilgrims and established ideals of tolerance and individual rights that shaped American history. "Astonishing . . . A book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past." --The New York Times When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records–recently declared a national treasure–are now being translated. Russell Shorto draws on this remarkable archive in The Island at the Center of the World, which has been hailed by The New York Times as “a book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past.” The Dutch colony pre-dated the “original” thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own.
Download or read book American Metropolis written by George J. Lankevich and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1998-06-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magnet for the ambitious, lodestone for talented and oppressed alike, Mecca for businessmen and immigrants, New York City has presided for over 350 years as the critical center of American life. From its origins as a primitive Dutch outpost to the sprawling urban complex it is today, the defining characteristic of New York has been continuous, dramatic, and rapid change. Historian George J. Lankevich's volume concentrates on political and economic affairs, illustrating how New York has always combined principle and pragmatism in its role as pace-setter in business communications, education, urban policy, and cultural life. American Metropolis is loosely divided into three historical epochs, each spanning roughly one of the last three centuries. In its early years, New York was defined by trial and tribulation; wars, fires, rebellions, and revolution were guiding influences on the colonial port. Nineteenth-century New York history was dominated by heroic figures in the form of bosses, reformers, merchant princes and statesmen, by enormous population increases, and by the achievement of commercial, financial, and cultural supremacy. For much of the twentieth century, greater New York, plagued by crime, white flight, fiscal trauma, and decay, embodied the nation's urban crisis. Its current Renaissance stands as fresh testimony to its characteristic vitality and resilience. Emphasizing the cyclical nature of New York's history through tides of crisis and renewal, George J. Lankevich here offers the definitive short history of America's most important and vibrant metropolis. By understanding the history of New York, we obtain a vital sense of what America was, is, and can become.
